Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Hello and There Have You Been!

It struck me that I haven't been making much of an appearance in the old "public figurena" lately, and that it was high time we checked in with one another. I know that you know that I'm not much for this kind of thing, so I'll keep this brief and to the point. I will also ramble, and go on at length, and take many breaks to view Internet pornography about maids.

1. "Hey, did you quit or something?"I've been posting the four weekly Achewood strips in the morning lately, and this has caused some confusion. It upsets routines. It drives people in Australia up the wall, because their "morning" is actually something like sixteen hours later, and their coffee has long since gotten cold, and they've drummed their fingers to the bone. It's hard to please a twenty-four hour world, people. So, why the different posting schedule? Well, I've been doing the strips at night, often very late at night. Sometimes I finish them so late that my synapses are actually sitting in a pile next to my mousepad, and I don't have the use of them. I've found that I like to look over the strip when I wake up, gently burnish it here and there, and then send it on its way. Why don't I work a day in advance, you ask? Well, that's kind of like asking me why I'm a boy. God put what he did where he did, and now I'm prone to thinking of Chuck Norris every few days. I make no apologies. I doubt Chuck would either.

2. The Child.A little while back I got all high on my abilities and had a child. I posted updates about her life, and then I stopped doing that when she got to be about two and a half. She's three now, and I can't say that she's let up much. We went to Disneyland recently, and late one night when I was on a bipedal errand I fetched some cereal milk and bottled water from a liquor store a block past our hotel. Plumbing around for a personal nadir, I ducked into a Del Taco for a cheeseburger and a side of fries. The food was disgusting. The patty was a disc of paste like you might peel off a roll of waxed paper. The fries were crinkle-cut relics from a joyless factory thousands of miles distant, their crenulated surface informed by food styling trends set in the early '80s. I was glad she was not there to witness as her father stuffed three dollars worth of expedient gunk into an sticky, overflowing trash bin and wandered back out into the night.

3. The Great Outdoor Fight bookThis is a big one. We've had it in the works for a while...roughly since before YouTube and Facebook emerged to remind us all that we should have learned how to write computer programs. Dark Horse will release this hardcover in the fall, and it will be on Amazon as a pre-order starting sometime in mid-April. What I recommend is getting a case for your trunk, so that you can make friends wherever you go, and also keep a stack in the front hall for departing guests. It might also be prudent to keep a few dozen in a large bowl in your office or waiting room.

4. The 2nd Achewood CookbookIt's an open secret that Achewood sells a cookbook, and in the five years since its release I've been testing, learning, tasting, and documenting my further experiments in the kitchen. It's just a gigantic mess of a Microsoft Word file at the moment, but I hope to have it dressed up and pretty by summer. Whereas the first book is full of basics (who else will tell you how to really cook rice and hot dogs?), this one is more advanced, more sophisticated, and assumes that the reader has a cutting board.